The carnivorousness we saw in Bloom early in this episode here turns into what looks kind of like ogling. Eyeing the haunches of the nextdoor girl, her “vigorous hips,” gets Bloom thinking about her whacking carpets outside, and in fact he lingers on the image. This is not the last time we will see our hero indulging in a kind of S and M-esque fantasizing, nor is it the only instance of a propensity towards voyeurism. Molly may be Bloom’s primary object of desire, but that definitely does not keep him from looking elsewhere.

But the fantasy girl next door with the meaty behind takes on other casts as well; she reminds Bloom of cattle, which combined with picking up a paper and reading about Zionist land development in Palestine (the building of a settlement at the Sea of Galilee by Moses Montefiore, a Victorian Anglo-Jewish philanthropist), leads Bloom to begin pondering the land of his origin. Over the next ten pages as Bloom turns back to home and Molly, feminine imagery will combine with another series of imaginings of the east, this time the Holy Land, and this time rather bleak.

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This page uses a technique we will see a few times over the next ten or so pages: Bloom existing simultaneously in the real world and in the world being conjured by his imagination. These boundaries get very blurry, literally and figuratively, as you can see in the fading of the shop floor tiles into the space of the cattlemarket. (Incidentally, working in a cattlemarket was one of Bloom’s previous jobs, as Gifford points out.) The slapping of the “ripemeated hindquarter” parallels the “prime” haunches of the nextdoor girl, moving us back into Bloom’s thoughts lingering on, again, whacking.

I think the narrator’s language is especially interesting here: “bending his senses and his will,” his “gaze” “at rest.” The “bending,” “soft,” “patiently,” “rest” seem to be in contrast to the “whack by whack by whack”…or is it? Are we meant to simply get into the rhythm of Bloom’s slightly erotic ruminations? Our gaze follows Bloom’s back up to the woman’s bustle. I think we should always be looking to see where Bloom is looking, how he bends towards his object of desire, even when he can’t have it.

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There’s a joke here that works on a couple of levels, and is made more visible thanks to the adaptation into comics.  Dlugacz, the Jewish butcher, is wearing a brown apron.  This prompts Bloom to imagine the next-door girl wearing brown scapulars, a sign of a devotee of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which is the way members of the Carmelite Order refer to the Virgin Mary.  Lay people can wear the brown scapulars if it has been blessed by a priest, and it is supposed to grant its wearer eternal salvation.  A wearer of the brown scapular may never take it off (although Bloom seems to be suggesting in his daydreams that the next-door girl could be taking other items of clothing off).

So:  what we learn here is Bloom may be of Jewish background (through his father), but he also knows enough about Catholicism, thanks to his Irish Catholic mother and living in a city dominated by Catholics and their traditions.  He associates the Jewish butcher with a sign of Catholic belief, and he fantasizes about what the next-door girl might look like under her clothes.  The brown scapular might be “defending her both ways” (front and behind, thanks to how one wears it over the shoulders), but it’s not defending her from Bloom’s gently leering imagination.

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The “sting of disregard”/”weak pleasure” shows how Bloom gives women power, sexual and otherwise.  Is this suggesting he finds being ignored kind of a turn-on?  Bloom wants, and then not being wanted back makes him want more.

While Dlugacz patiently waits for his threepence, Bloom indulges in a bit of soft-soft-core fantasizing.  I like the way Rob conceptualizes this moment as theatrical:  he is actually representing the stage of Bloom’s mind, and playing off the ways fantasizing is about watching, a little bit about voyeurism turned inward.  It’s also an interesting comment on how people we turn into objects of desire could be thought of as performing for our benefit.  And yes, of course, there’s a dirty joke about sizable sausages here.

We’ve already seen how Joyce uses the theatre, so the image is definitely fitting; and here, as elsewhere, we have an allusion to a song:  “O Please Mr. Policeman, I’m Lost in the Woods.”  It’s not mentioned on Music in the Works of James Joyce, but it is part of the James Joyce Sheet Music Collection at the University of Miami.

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Bloom’s resignation in the face of a thwarted desire, a lost object of desire, might be familiar by now; if it’s not, it will be. He was hoping for the small pleasure of a glimpse of the nextdoor girl’s ass as she walked away, despite the “sting of disregard”; alas, he is too late. This missed opportunity, coupled with reading about kibbutzim in Palestine in the paper he takes away from Dlugacz’s, will darken Bloom’s mood considerably over the next few pages. The loss of the girl, who he of course never really had, combines with other losses and the transformation of the exotic East of earlier into a desert wasteland. The association of feminine imagery with loss and devastation in this sequence is pretty striking. You might want to think back to Stephen’s dark imaginings of loss around his mother and his perceived desolation of the sea and sky in Telemachus.

At first, the quotes collecting in Bloom’s mind from the advertisement for a Zionist planters’ company, perhaps something like the Palestine Land Development Company mentioned a bit ago, depict a lush and fertile place. The Jews returning to their homeland will take the wasteland and replace it with abundance, orangegroves and melonfields. We can see the Dublin street scene in the background, but it’s taking on the warm glow of the Middle East. Is Bloom in this moment regretting his exile from his homeland? “Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.”

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